kirkt
28th of May 2010 (Fri), 10:20
Wow do the right tools for the job make life easier. After having tried in vain to shoot 360x180 equirectangular panoramas (spherical panoramas) with a 24mm lens on a ball head, a 15mm full frame fisheye and a spherical pano head make life simple. This is a low-res test panorama, composed of 90 images (6 around, 1 zenith, 3 nadir, 9 images per position for HDR). The sequence was shot in harsh midday light, around 2 PM. I used a Canon 15mm 2.8 full frame fisheye on my 5D with a Nodal Ninja 5 pano head. The shoot itself took about 20 minutes to set up, dial in the exposure brackets and fire away. I shot RAW (converted with Camera Neutral, all settings and tone curve zeroed) and exported all images to small 16bit TIFFs (1200 px on the long edge) so that the testing of the stitching would go faster. I used PTGui and masked each nadir shot in PS with an alpha channel to aid in the nadir patching. I exported the blended pano as HDR and tonemapped in Picturenaut, with some finishing in PS.
I'll post the middle exposure of each shot in a minute. This makes a really cool QTVR too. Once you have dialed in your pano head to the no parallax point, PTGui makes quick work of a job like this. The only manual control points needed were for the nadir patch that had a camera offset. Really amazing.
Next, the hi-res version! Maybe a went a little too warm on this version....
Kirk
http://kirkt.smugmug.com/Photography/Photo-of-the-Day/FinalTesthdrPNautTMa/881699484_pJptG-X3.jpg
I'll post the middle exposure of each shot in a minute. This makes a really cool QTVR too. Once you have dialed in your pano head to the no parallax point, PTGui makes quick work of a job like this. The only manual control points needed were for the nadir patch that had a camera offset. Really amazing.
Next, the hi-res version! Maybe a went a little too warm on this version....
Kirk
http://kirkt.smugmug.com/Photography/Photo-of-the-Day/FinalTesthdrPNautTMa/881699484_pJptG-X3.jpg